HICSS Book Club 2007

Albert:  1776 by David McCullough.  Esteemed historian David McCullough covers the military side of the momentous year of 1776 with characteristic insight and a gripping narrative, adding new scholarship and a fresh perspective to the beginning of the American Revolution. It was a turbulent and confusing time. (From Amazon.)  Albert listened to the audio book versions, and claims that he had more than a few NPR moments where he sat in the car, waiting to hear how a battle would turn out.

Irene:  the set of murder mystery books by Peter Corris.  As Irene describes the author, “he’s the Raymond Chandler of Australia.”   Cliff Hardy is the hard-boiled detective of Corris’s seris (Some titles:  Taking Care of Business, The Coast Road,  The Undertow).   Stories set in Australia, with lots of local color , tight Chandler-esque language, clever plots and twisty situations. 

Julia:  My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult.  Is it ethical to make a baby to become a supply of transplant material for her sicker, older sister?  The first line of the book puts it nicely:  "WHEN I WAS LITTLE, the great mystery to me wasn't how babies were made, but why..."  There was a case a few years ago of exactly this kind of situation, so the story isn’t at all far-fetched.  According to the author’s website, this is being turned into a move for 2008 release.  http://www.jodipicoult.com/faqs.html

Tom:  Omnivore’s Dilemma:  A natural history of four meals by Michael Pollan.  So where, exactly, does your food come from?  Pollan traces the origin of each of four very different meals to find out the backstory of that dinner you’re eating.  In the process he takes a look at industrial farming and why it’s so insatiably hooked on corn and petroleum.  At the same time, he devotes a long chapter to understanding what it means to hunt, kill, clean and prepare your own meat.  Best news, he’s not annoying or pedantic, but a writer with a gift for following a story where it leads.  Sobering, surprising and fascinating insights into food that speak to every part of our lives.  This belongs beside your cookbooks.  (See the Amazon web page for an interview of Michael Pollan by Bill Maher.)   

Katie:  Gilead: A novel by Marilynne Robinson.  Katie describes the writing as elegant and mesmerizing.  It’s the tale of Johne Ames, 76, a Methodist minister who’s writing a letter to his 7 year-old son in the wake of his failing health.  He writes an apologia of his life, trying to capture the essence of his world and what his son should know about it…and him. 

ROUND 2:  Faster descriptions of the best writing of the year…

Dan:  Last of the Blue Water Divers  by Carlos Eyles.  If you’ve seen my web page, you know I’m a diver, so I enjoy reading elegiac prose about the underwater world.  It’s an odd book, describing a macho, over-the-top time in the spearfishing world of Los Angeles in the ‘60s (something you didn’t know that you wanted to know about—trust me, it’s a fascinating look into a subculture you probably don’t know).  But at the same time, it’s set in the present as Carlos lives on a small boat sheltered in a cove off a Channel island near LA.  I find his descriptions of diving to be spot on, and makes me want to drop everything and get back to the water. 

John:  Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:  An Enquiry into Values  by Robert Pirsig.  If you’re of a certain age, then you’ve read this book and know what “quality” really means.  If you haven’t read this book, by all means, start reading.  It’s a complex book full of deep ideas about the nature of reality, quality and life that will stick with you for decades.  The ideas of Chataqua, quality and gumption are important concepts in my life because I read this book (in 1978).  Important. 

Wendy:  Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris.  In keeping with Wendy’s cultural critique theme, Letter is a scathing crit of this Christian nation and its paucity of clear thinking.  It’s not so much a book as it is ammunition for that next debate you have with your believing friends.  

Albert:  The Metaphysical Club : A Story of Ideas in America by Louis Menand.   “Despite this potentially forbidding theme, The Metaphysical Club is not a dry tome for academics. Instead, it is a quadruple biography, a wonderfully told story of ideas that advances by turning these thinkers into characters and bringing them to life. Menand links them through the Metaphysical Club, a conversational club formed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1872. "They helped put an end to the idea that the universe is an idea, that beyond the mundane business of making our way as best we can in a world shot through with contingency, there exists some order, invisible to us, whose logic we transgress at our peril." Academic freedom and cultural pluralism are just two of their legacies, and they are linchpins of democracy in a nonideological age.”  From Amazon reviews.  Albert made this sound fascinating—filling in gaps in your knowledge that you didn’t know you had.  

Irene:  One the Road by Jack Keroac.  On The Road, the most famous of Jack Kerouac's works, is not only the soul of the Beat movement and literature, but one of the most important novels of the century. On The Road is thinly fictionalized autobiography, filled with a cast made of Kerouac's real life friends, lovers, and fellow travelers. It’s a cross-country bohemian odyssey that not only influenced writing in the years since its 1957 publication, but penetrated into the deepest levels of American thought and culture.  “I’m on the road again..” sings Willie Nelson, and so are we all.  

Julia:  The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon.  In keeping with the autism theme, this is a murder mystery as seen from an autistic boy’s perspective.  It’s been described as an “eye-opening look into the mind of autism.”  Sounds good.  Must try. 

Tom:  Shaping Things by  Bruce Sterling.  Tom nominated this last year (see previous HICSS book club!) so I’ll just repeat that entry here.  "Shaping Things is about created objects and the environment, which is to say, it's about everything," writes Bruce Sterling in this addition to the Mediawork Pamphlet series. He adds, "Seen from sufficient distance, this is a small topic."  Sterling offers a brilliant, often hilarious history of shaped things. We have moved from an age of artifacts, made by hand, through complex machines, to the current era of "gizmos." New forms of design and manufacture are appearing that lack historical precedent, he writes; but the production methods, using archaic forms of energy and materials that are finite and toxic, are not sustainable. The future will see a new kind of object -- we have the primitive forms of them now in our pockets and briefcases: user-alterable, baroquely multi-featured, and programmable -- that will be sustainable, enhanceable, and uniquely identifiable. Sterling coins the term "spime" for them, these future manufactured objects with informational support so extensive and rich that they are regarded as material instantiations of an immaterial system.  (from the book’s description)

Katie:  An Introduction to English Poetry by James Fenton.  You think you know poetry?  Well, you probably need a refresher course.  This is a great summary of stuff you really ought to know, if you want to be more than just an uncultured cad.  And you do, don’t you?  From the ALA review of this book:  “Fenton is primarily concerned with the whys of English verse. Why is iambic pentameter the standard line in English? Why do modern poets recite as they do (flatly)? Why are some poetic forms more versatile in English than others? Why has poetic drama in English been moribund since the seventeenth century? If he doesn't have definitive or original answers to such questions, he always speaks authoritatively about them as a poet and broad-ranging student of poetry. He knows and practices what he talks about. He gets history into the discussion by discriminating between what can and can't now be read comprehensibly--that is, between later-than-fifteenth-century verse and earlier poetry, even Chaucer's, which is pronounced very differently--and in the chronological range, from Elizabethan lyrics to a contemporary experimental sonnet, of the poems he quotes to exemplify different forms, meters, and rhythmic variations within the verse line.”